Rwandan Hutu soldiers shot down the Hutu president's plane on the eve of the 1994 genocide, according to a government-commissioned inquiry that formally assigned blame for the crash that set off the slaughter of more than 500,000 people.

The panel concluded that Tutsi rebels fighting the president could not have shot down his plane, citing witnesses who described what appeared to be missiles fired from inside or near a military barracks.

President Juvénal Habyarimana had been returning to Rwanda after talks with the Tutsi rebels. Extremist Hutu politicians and military officers were opposed to a power-sharing deal, the panel said: "Through repeated and unequivocal warnings, they indicated to him that his acceptance to implement the agreement would be signing for his own death and this is exactly what happened."

After the plane was shot down, militants from the Hutu ethnic majority began 100 days of frenzied killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The slaughter stopped when Paul Kagame's Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, toppled the Hutu extremists. He is now president.

The Rwandan panel reached its conclusion after interviewing more than 500 people, including Rwandan and foreign military officers who were on duty when Habyarimana's plane was shot down.

Jennifer Cooke, of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said: "For the Rwandan government, this puts to bed any speculation that the [RPF] may have been implicated in the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane." But she said critics would question the report because the panel was appointed by the government.

"I don't think it (the report) will convince many of Kagame's skeptics or most of his critics," Cooke said. "Perception is also as important as fact in this kind of case."

Rwanda formed the panel in October 2007, almost a year after a French judicial investigation accused Kagame of ordering Habyarimana's assassination. The Rwandan panel was led by Jean Mutsinzi, a judge of Rwanda's Supreme Court. Other panel members include Rwandan legal experts and former government officials.

The French judiciary is looking into the downing of Habyarimana's plane because the crew was French.

A former French investigating judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, who began the inquiry, also accused nine other ranking Rwandans of plotting the attack. He issued arrest warrants for the nine but not Kagame because France grants immunity to heads of state.

That decision led to the deterioration of already tense relations between France and Rwanda over the European nation's role in the 1994 genocide. Rwanda cut off diplomatic relations with France in 2006 over the French investigation. Diplomatic ties were restored three years later, in November.